Slightly strange head flow question.

1W&CG stated it preety good for "8 beers into it."

Heres a peice of good news. No matter what your head flow is, great combo cam be put togther without getting nutz on the cam specs.

A basic view;

Build the engine to compliment the cars intended performance.

A race car will look for every bit of lift and then some. (As mentioned before) More lift than the head flow, excesive converter and gear.

A street strip car will look to mimic the race car, but with a little less comp. ratio for pump gas, a litle less cam and converter. Total cam lift at or near max head flow.

A high performance street machine will look for things like a milder cam that doesn't take advantage of the heads flow ability's 100%. Maybe some where in the 85% plus area.
Total cam lift would be close but yet still a bit far away from peak flow. The head may not be fully ported ethier.

High performance street will not care so much. An example of pocket ported head, the lift may even be as short of peak head flow abilty by .030 lift.

CFM & HP gain talk again;


You have it right... as it goes in the real world. Only because the head, in order to gain more flow cfm, at least to the level of 300 cfm for the small block will require a bigger port window. The way around this is to raise the port, as seen on some race(y) heads.

The only other way around this I can think of is to charge the engine.
(AKA Super Charger/Turbo)

Now combined with the above, what is your intended target? At some point, getting more cfm will mean a getting the other parts to work with it better. Building an engine, lets say other wise stock minus the cam and heads but with a big cam and fully ported heads will create a combo of miss matched parts and poor performance. Simply adding a converter and gear may not be the best way to go about it and make matters worse.